Tuesday, July 8, 2003

Raising Kane

As is common knowledge in the comic book business, Bob Kane did not draw all the hundreds of Batman comic book stories adorned with his signature. He did illustrate the early stories, albeit with increasing assistance — but early on, the character caught on big and DC wanted to publish more material than Kane could produce, even with folks like Jerry Robinson and George Roussos helping him. So an arrangement was made with Kane and DC's editors began hiring others (like Dick Sprang) to draw Batman stories that Kane had nothing to do with, even though they were usually signed with his name. Later on, Kane decided he didn't want to spend his days slaving away at a drawing table so, as part of a settlement with DC regarding the rights to Batman, he worked out a deal that made this possible.

They negotiated a contract whereby Kane agreed to produce a specified number of pages for DC each month, and to receive a high-enough page rate that he could hire someone else to ghost the work and live very well off the balance. He engaged a wonderful man named Sheldon Moldoff and thereafter, DC sent scripts to Kane, Kane sent them to Moldoff, Moldoff drew the pages and sent them to Kane, and Kane delivered them to DC and picked up the check. Once in a while, especially at the outset, Kane seems to have done a smidgen of art correction on Moldoff's pages — but for a decade or two, the work Kane handed in to DC was 90% Moldoff. (For a more detailed explanation of all this, here are some articles I wrote about Kane.)

DC often reprints stories that originally appeared with incomplete or erroneous credits. They can usually manage to figure out the writer credits on material that originally appeared without any and to identify uncredited artists. In the past, they have sometimes credited Moldoff on the material he ghosted for Kane...but recently collections do not do this. A hardcover anthology released in the last month lists Bob Kane as the artist on stories that no one disputes are primarily or wholly the work for Sheldon Moldoff. People are writing me to ask why.

I have spoken to no one at DC about this but I'll bet I can guess. DC paid Kane to do that work in the first place. That he subcontracted to someone else is one of those cans of worms that no one is eager to open, and not just because of Bob Kane. A lot of comic book artists over the years have employed assistants or ghosts. To just cite a few examples here, there were a number of artists like Frank Giacoia, Vince Colletta and Sal Trapani who were primarily inkers. When someone gave them an assignment to pencil a story, they would often hire a friend to do the pencilling for them — for example, stories that were obviously pencilled by Steve Ditko and inked by Sal Trapani appeared in Strange Adventures #188 and 189. Sometimes, artists would share assignments: A lot of stories inked by Giacoia or Joe Giella feature pages by the other. Gil Kane, when he got behind, would sometimes have Mike Sekowsky pencil a few pages of Green Lantern or Atom. Plenty of guys have employed assistants who could come forward to argue credits, demand royalties, dispute copyrights, etc.

As students of the art form, we can and should identify credits and let nothing stand in our way but certainty. But DC probably has to recognize the legal realities, which is that their business relationship on any given story was with a certain person. Lawyers are probably getting nervous that it could lead to a lot of headaches and perhaps it already has. My guess is that it's neater and safer for them to not get into it. So it's up to us independent historians to identify who done what.

• Posted at 11:13 PM · LINK

About Gene Hazelton

Even a lot of cartoon and comic book buffs don't know the name of Gene Hazelton, but he was one of the top guys in the animation business and he later drew the Flintstones newspaper strip when it was at its peak. Today, another fine Flintstone-drawer, Scott Shaw!, tells us all about the one comic book Gene ever drew. [Warning: The locale to which you'll be redirected sometimes has some very annoying pop-up ads. But Scott's piece is worth braving them.]

• Posted at 1:12 PM · LINK

Savage Commentary

MSNBC just fired Michael Savage, a gent whose on-air "political commentary" lived up to his assumed surname. The official reason was that he had crossed some line of propriety when he told an abusive caller to "get AIDS and die." But of course, the real reason he was sacked was that his ratings were in the toilet...far lower than those of the show that had been axed to make room for him. His "act" was always what it was, the network knew the kind of remarks he always made, and that's what they bought in the first place.

The thing I never see discussed with regard to folks like Savage is this: It is an act, at least to some extent. Talk radio, from whence he came, is full of people who realized one day that a certain kind of hysterical ranting, especially keyed to certain issues, was the way to attain fame and fortune. The few times I heard Savage, he struck me as a guy who was well aware that if he didn't fill the airwaves with crazed invective, he'd probably be assistant manager at a Wendy's somewhere. There is a marketplace mentality to almost every kind of entertainment, whereby suppliers imitate what seems to be selling. Right-wing bigotry and trashing liberals is often quite commercial, and Savage has done quite well for himself in the bookstores and on radio with that routine. (When people ask why there's no significant liberal talk radio, I think the answer is simple: No one's gotten rich doing it. As soon as someone does, there'll be dozens more.)

Whether Savage or any of those folks really believe what they spew is almost beside the point. Probably to some extent, they do. It is not uncommon in the world to start believing your own hyperbole. Years ago, I produced a TV special which involved Vince McMahon and a couple of the top W.W.F. wrestlers. The main thing I learned about wrestling was that even though the feuds are scripted, they tend to become true in some ways. We had Hulk Hogan and "Rowdy" Roddy Piper on the show and we literally could not have them in the studio at the same time. The real human beings had grown to detest each other in much the same way that their ring characters then did. I guess if I were being paid to scream at you, call you names and body-slam you to the canvas, you might not become too fond of me.

Tomorrow, if I were lusting for cash and recognition and all the things people get into broadcasting for, I might decide talk radio was my easiest point of access. And I might look at recent success stories and emulate what's working, perhaps kicking it up a notch or three to get attention. It might only mean exaggerating my own viewpoints a bit but it might also mean inverting them. Either way, if I went on the air and had to fill a lot of hours flogging my worldview, keeping it interesting and getting attention, my opinions would change. I'd get reinforcement from those who phoned up to cheer me on, and another kind of reinforcement from the jerks who called up to tell me off. If attacking Hillary Clinton (to pick an easy target) got me better ratings, better money, book deals, etc., I might spend a lot of time attacking her and finding reasons to attack her. And since I didn't want to feel like a complete hypocrite when I went to bed each night, I'd probably decide that, yes, I might be exaggerating occasionally in order to keep it interesting but that I really believed what I was spending my life yelling about.

This kind of thinking — the motive of success over sense — seems so obvious to me when I see a Michael Savage, an Ann Coulter, a Bob Grant, etc. I even see it in liberal pundits and performers, though there's still more money in demonizing Clintons than there is in Bush-bashing, so there's less of that at the moment. But it will change. Do we really think that Arianna Huffington experienced a sudden catharsis that moved her from all the way from the right-wing to the left? Or did she maybe realize that the conservative punditry was getting overpopulated, that she could not compete with the Coulters of the world and that it might be smart to stake out the "attractive female activist" side of that street before it got too crowded? Pendulums do swing and there will soon be a liberal Michael Savage and — who knows? — it might even be Michael Savage.

• Posted at 11:00 AM · LINK

July 9, 2003 • Current • July 7, 2003